Dick Cheney's Oily Dream

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney's vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map:

Vice-President
Dick Cheney's vision of completely redrawing the map of the Middle
East following the 9/11 attacks is "not stupid," and is "possible over
time," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.

In his new book, A Journey, the former Labour Party leader wrote that Cheney wanted a wholesale reorganization of the political map of the Middle East after 9/11. The vice president "would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it -- Hezbollah, Hamas, etc," Blair wrote.

What does this mean?

Well,
as I have repeatedly pointed out, the "war on terror" in the Middle
East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with
remaking that region's geopolitical situation to America's advantage.

Starting
right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to
create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya,
Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon; the goal was never really to destroy Al
Qaeda. As American reporter Gareth Porter writes in Asia Times:

Three
weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective
of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but
overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other
countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted
extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas
Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's
account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map
of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was
supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.

Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling
for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a
series of states...

***

General
Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars
being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list
of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul
Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan
and Somalia [and Lebanon].

***

When
this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark
list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."

***

The
Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military
aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to
terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to
isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy"
their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass
destruction (WMD)...

Rumsfeld's paper was
given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US
military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the
Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called
explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of
ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order
to try to catch bin Laden.

Instead, the
Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had
supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

***

After
the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1998] by al-Qaeda
operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael
Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in
Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However,
senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a
2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at
Tufts University.

A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".

And
at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between
top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge
whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same
time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case."
In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that
Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an
excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

(2)
acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is
consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take
the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist
organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who
planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that
occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush
administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by
representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11
attacks. See this.

But you probably haven't heard that - according to the New Yorker - a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC
staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered
the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:

"The review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”.

It
is difficult to brush off Cheney's Energy Task Force's examination of
arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with
known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.

But don't believe me...

The
above-linked New Yorker article quotes a former senior director for
Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:

If
this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts
the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry
sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.

For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him . . . .

***

Cheney
also knew 9/11 was going to happen. The government knew that
terrorists could use planes as weapons -- and had even run its own
drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center
and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes -- all
before 9/11. Indeed, the government heard the 9/11 plans from the
hijackers' own mouths before 9/11.

"During
the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a
young man who would come in and say to the Vice President … the plane is
50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the
plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do
the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his
neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard
anything to the contrary!?"

Could
it be that Cheney got so lost in his dreams of redrawing the map of the
Middle East (and grabbing some oil along the way) that he - as the guy
in charge of all counter-terrorism efforts for the United States on 9/11
- spaced out and forgot to engage America's standard air defenses?

I don't know ... But - unfortunately - Cheney's oily dream has turned into a nightmare for America. See this, this and this.